In the manufacture of papermachine and like clothing it has been proposed to create an apertured fabric by feeding an array of yarns and polymeric matrix material to the surface of a pinned drum and passing the yarns and matrix material through a roller nip thereat to be pressed into full engagement with the drum surface, the matrix material being in molten form and the resultant apertured sheet material being cooled and removed from the drum. The molten matrix material will ordinarily be provided from a heated reservoir through which the yarns pass, and from which the yarn/matrix material combination is fed to the drum surface, the matrix material flowing into the channels in the profiled drum surface under the effect of the pressure applied by the nip roller.
Papermachine and like fabrics are of significant dimensions, a typical fabric being, say, 60 meters long by 10 meters wide, and such fabrics require a high degree of permeability which is sensibly constant throughout the body of the fabric, although a reduction in permeability is perhaps desirable in the edge regions of the structure. Given the accuracy required of the pins provided on the drum, both as to their small dimensions and close centres, each pin representing a single aperture and an aperture being, for example, 0.2 mm square and the pins being at 1.1 mm centres both in the axial and peripheral directions of the drum, and the need to produce a fabric having a width of significant proportions, for reasons of economy, in terms both of financial and space considerations, it is more realistic to produce a plurality of relatively narrow fabric bands to be joined together in side-by-side disposition, rather than to produce the fabric to its full intended width in the first instance, and it is to this concept that the present invention is directed.